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Two days after Christmas Amy and I hopped on a plane for Jordan. If a commercial plane were to fly direct as the crow, the flight would probably take about 30 minutes, but since we had to make a wide arc around Israeli air space it took about an hour. We flew over the snow peaked mountains of central Lebanon, heading east and then turned south. We landed in Amman, Jordan’s capitol, rented a car and then off we went. Since we knew that the city of Amman was going to be choked with traffic, we immediately headed south to the city of Madaba and tried to find a place to stay for the night. Strangely enough, though, every place we went to was booked up, but we never found out why. Finally we came across a guesthouse called the Queen Ayhola. This place looked like your usual hostel that was a bit run down but fine to stay at. That is until we turned down the bed and saw that we had to share it with more bed bugs than I saw in my whole time in India. Since we knew there was nowhere else in town to stay and the rental car was far too small to sleep in, we decided to figure out a way to remedy the situation. When I went down to the front desk to ask for a new, clean set of sheets, the night manager told me that he didn’t have any more. When I pressed him about it, he told me that the place only had one set of sheets per room and since we had taken the last room, there were no more sheets available. Right. I decided against ringing his chicken neck and headed back up to the room. It’s a sad thing when you realize it would be cleaner to be camping on the ground without a tent than staying in a hotel room. We decided to pull all the blankets off of the bed and throw them in a corner, then shake out the sheet the best we could. After that, we put the sheet back on the bed but not the blankets. Then we, leaving all our clothes on, put on all the Gore-Tex raingear we had brought with us, including putting the hood up and then hopped into bed. This way, should the sprinkler system go off we’d be ready, short of the fact that there was no sprinkler system. Needless to say our dreams were filled with images of a waking to a Gulliver’s Travels type of capture by a tribe of angry bed bugs. In the morning the desk manager couldn’t understand why we wanted no part of the breakfast he was offering there at the Queen Ayhola. For censorship reasons I’ll let you use your imagination to think of the nickname we gave this place, but it sounds like…” We got out of there as quickly as we could, but not before checking out some Byzantine Mosaic tile work at an old church in town. One large map mosaic was from AD 560 and had places named in Greek.
Once I figured out how to get out of the city (we were using a really vague map provided by the rental car company and there’s a good chance that it was actually a map of Saudi Arabia) our first stop was Mount Nebo. Mount Nebo is the mountain top that Moses, at age 120 looked out and saw “The Promised Land” then died. And who could blame the old boy, he was 120. There’s a small museum and a view point up there now. The mountain top Moses was looking out from is actually a high point on a cliff ridge that stands over the giant Jordan River Valley below. The Jordan River is now the boundary between Jordan , which is on the East bank of the Jordan River and the Palestinian Territory of the West Bank, which is, of course, on the west bank of the Jordan River. Stop me if I’m going too fast.
While the very bottom of the Jordan River valley is green with agriculture, everything else in the 360 degree panorama is dry desert. I believe that back in Moses’ time, this area was all a lot wetter and more fertile but that a few thousand years ago the climate of this area changed making it more arid now than it used to be. Either that or Moses was so delirious from the climb that he was seeing a mirage. All in all, it’s a pretty spectacular view from up there as the wind howls across the ridge. To the south we could see the Dead Sea.
Another interesting thing about the landscape up there on Mount Nebo is that it looks, well, for lack of a better word, really “Biblical”. I guess what I mean is that it looks like the terrain you’ve seen for years in any movie that involves a story from the Bible: dry, scrub brushy hillsides covered with random light tan boulders. It makes you feel like that at any moment Charlton Heston could jump out from behind one of those boulders. Or at the very least Mel Brooks.
From Mount Nebo, we headed south on the King’s Highway, crossing a vast and beautiful canyon called the Wadi Mujib. A river runs from the eastern Jordanian desert, through the Wadi Mujib and out to the Dead Sea. We crossed the river on the top of a huge dam there at the bottom of the massive canyon. Traveling across the Jordanian desert I had to keep reminding myself where I was because it looks remarkably like the desert of Baja California in Mexico, sans the tacos.
South of the Wadi Mujib, we stopped to see an ancient, 12th Century Crusader castle in the town of Karak. Again, on our departure, with the help of our trusty map, we made a few wrong turns and ended up in the middle of a rally protesting Israel’s bombing of Gaza (the bombing had started the day before). After a few zigzags we were back on the road south just as the sun was setting.
We still had a couple of hours of driving to go before we would make it to our destination for the night in southern Jordan and to help lighten the mood of the ride, I decided to give a Jordanian soldier who was hitchhiking a ride. He was a nice enough man who spoke a tiny bit of English and told us he grew up in the area and was heading home. Amy told me I needed to mention to you in this blog that he was also armed, with a holstered gun on his hip. Details, details. After dropping him off, I felt that there wasn’t enough excitement going on during the drive so I decided to give a ride to another man who appeared to pop out of nowhere along the dark road. He didn’t speak any English, so our conversation was limited to him telling us that he used to be in the Army. After dropping this second hitcher off, Amy informed me that I had met and exceeded my quota of Jordanian hitch hikers for the remainder of the trip.
Finally we arrived in the town of Wadi Musa (Valley of Moses) which is just outside the gates of Petra, one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. There’s even a pizza place right outside the gates called “Seven Wonder’s Pizza” just to prove it. Petra is a giant cluster of temples and tombs that were cut right out of the stone cliffs of the desert. They were carved by the Nabataeans, Arabs who controlled the frankincense trade routes of the region in pre-Roman times. They built these tombs, temples and their city in a hidden valley in the south Jordanian desert. You enter the site by walking down a very narrow, 50 foot wide slot canyon for about a mile or two and then all of a sudden it opens up to the front of a massive stone carved tomb called the Treasury. The carved facades of the temples and tombs are incredible and enormous. The number of people trying to sell you a ride on a camel is more impressive. We spent two full days wandering around Petra, climbing rock ridges and dodging touts. It is for sure a touristy area but definitely worth seeing.
From Petra we drove even further south through the desert to an area called Wadi Rum. This is the area that T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) helped fight the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the 20th Century. We shared a jeep tour of this desert area with a couple who was living in Cairo, Egypt. The woman worked for the Filipino consulate in Cairo working on abused domestic worker cases (sound familiar?) and her boyfriend was from Germany and just hanging out vacationing for the winter (sound even more familiar?). The desert landscape was striking. The desert was a mix of rock, scrub brush and big sand dunes, some tan, some red. Big rock arches would pop up every once in a while. Amy and I scurried barefoot up some of the rock formations and walked in the dunes as the cool sand worked its way between our toes. We’d spend most of the day out there before hitting the road again and heading south, our new friends from Cairo in tow.
We headed to Aqaba, in the southwest corner of Jordan where the desert meets the Red Sea. Somewhere around here would be the spot where Moses parted the waters in the old biblical story. We dipped our toes in the sea and bid our friends farewell, as they were catching a ferry back to Egypt. It was amazing to think that from where we stood, on the shores of the Red Sea, we could see four different countries: Egypt, Israel, Jordan and to our left, Saudi Arabia. Amy and I found a place to stay a few miles from the Saudi border; it was now New Year’s Eve.
That night, Amy and I would toast in the New Year with a glass of Arak, an eastern Mediterranean distilled liquor made from grapes and mixed with aniseed. It is served over ice with cold water and has a strong licorice flavor. I’m holding back my gag reflex just describing it to you, it’s utterly disgusting.
The next morning we brushed our teeth twice and headed up the Dead Sea highway, which parallels the Jordanian/Israeli border. There were soldiers and watch towers spread out along the way watching over the border which was a couple miles to the west of the highway. As we approached the Dead Sea we saw that its southern end was consumed by salt mining. The sea itself had been divided up into square sections and was being dried and harvested for its minerals. We finally reached the Dead Sea itself and drove along its eastern edge, our ears popping as we approached its minus 1,385 foot below sea level shore. The shoreline was all rocky with no sign of a beach. The sea is about 30 miles long and about 10 miles wide. Across the water you could see the Palestinian Territory of the West Bank. Since there were no cheap, budget or midrange accommodations, Amy and I were forced to stay at the Dead Sea Marriott, a 5 star, high end luxury resort. Oh well, the sacrifices one makes for travel. This place was pretty decadent with 3 pool areas, 5 restaurants, 4 bars and a spa, all right there on the shore of the Dead Sea. It was also quite pricy even by US standards.
The first thing we did there was head down to the waters of the Dead Sea. There were vats of Dead Sea mud set up on the water’s edge that had been farmed out of the sea. The mud was chock full of minerals that were supposedly good for your skin. The idea was to rub the mud all over your body, let it dry and then rinse it off in the sea. Amy went right for it and smeared up until she looked like Al Jolson. I wasn’t touching the stuff. We then worked our way into the water which was a little chilly. It’s recommended that you slowly back into the water, sitting down and going in butt first. I think the reason for this is to reduce the risk of tweaking yourself by diving into water this buoyant. And buoyant it was. You did not need to tread water at any point; you just laid there and bobbed. You could literally go into a sitting position in the water and your torso would be high enough out of the water that you could hold a book and read it. It was really cool. We just sat there, bobbing like corks on the sea. Needless to say, the water had a really strong salty taste to it, being that it was 8.6 times saltier than the ocean, putting it at almost 34% salinity.
From the Dead Sea we would travel a little ways north to an area called Bethany-Beyond-Jordan. It was the spot where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, and is on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, which flows south into the Dead Sea. From this point, if we looked way up to the east, we could see Mount Nebo, where we started our trip from. Due to the shifting river and the massive amounts of water taken out for irrigation now, the baptism site is no longer at the river’s edge and the river itself is only about 25 feet across, dark and muddy. There was, however, some nice vegetation and birds along its banks. I dunked my pigfoot into the water hoping for a healing miracle to no avail and immediately abandoned my faith knowing that I would have to make a sacrifice to the pagan foot gods if I wanted results, but that’s another story.
The area around the baptism site is a military zone and there were plenty of Jordanian soldiers and lookout towers around, with the Israeli flag flying right on the other side of the river. There was also no shortage of tourists crowding down at the river’s edge, filling up used plastic water bottles with the murky, pesticide tainted slurry that was the Jordan River.
From there we headed north through the Jordan River Valley, passing vegetable stands and farmland. The fields were lush and green and the roadsides were lined with people selling the produce they’d grown a few yards away. Also lining the road were large canvas tents that served as the homes to the farm workers and their families. It had a very “Grapes of Wrath” feeling to it.
From the river valley, we headed up the steep winding road that leads us back towards Amman, ears popping all the way. We passed through Amman and headed into north western Jordan to an area called Jerash. The northern part of Jordan looks a lot like the terrain in Lebanon, very hilly and covered with scrub brush and trees. It was a lot cooler up there as well. Jerash is a well preserved Roman city that was excavated over the past 80 some odd years. We spent the day walking around the temples, plazas and theaters, some of which are over 1,800 years old and in very good preserved condition. There is even a renovated hippodrome where re-enactments of chariot races take place. A bit corny, but pretty cool to see giving you a bit of that “Ben Hur” feeling.
After Jerash, our time was running short, so off to the airport we went. We timed it to try and spend as little time in the airport as possible and so were cutting it close that morning. Things were going well until we were passing through the security check. In Jordan, women go through a different metal detector than men, so Amy got through quickly and was waiting on the other side while I stood in line with a bunch of other men. When I got up to the metal detector I was wearing a fleece sweater, thin polyester hiking pants and hiking shirt and was standing in my socks. I had no metal on me whatsoever. The metal detector, of course, went off and the guard gestured for me to step back. In the meantime, as is custom, 5 other men tried to get through the metal detector, all setting if off as well. As they, too, retreated to take off shoes and watches, I took off my fleece and tried again. No doing, the metal detector went off again. The guard, again, gestured for me to step back and the 5 men who had failed previously were back up trying again, and again they set the detector off. I said to the guard, “I have nothing else on me”, forgetting that he did not speak English. He just gestured me back again and I, out of frustration, stripped down to my boxers and socks then walked through the metal detector which, unbelievable, went off again. Everyone around the security point was now laughing, including me, when I realized I was wearing a pair of boxers that had Hawaiian hula girls on them and my dirty white gym socks. The guard laughed and just waved me through. Amy watched from the other side and handed me my clothes that had gone through the X-ray machine. I felt like Foghorn Leghorn after he gets run through the hay bailing machine and loses all of his feathers, then carries them off in a bundle. I quickly dressed and we made it to the gate just as they were boarding our plane. The funny part about it is that I don’t even have any metal in my foot anymore since it was all taken out in December. Must have been my fillings, right?
Once I figured out how to get out of the city (we were using a really vague map provided by the rental car company and there’s a good chance that it was actually a map of Saudi Arabia) our first stop was Mount Nebo. Mount Nebo is the mountain top that Moses, at age 120 looked out and saw “The Promised Land” then died. And who could blame the old boy, he was 120. There’s a small museum and a view point up there now. The mountain top Moses was looking out from is actually a high point on a cliff ridge that stands over the giant Jordan River Valley below. The Jordan River is now the boundary between Jordan , which is on the East bank of the Jordan River and the Palestinian Territory of the West Bank, which is, of course, on the west bank of the Jordan River. Stop me if I’m going too fast.
While the very bottom of the Jordan River valley is green with agriculture, everything else in the 360 degree panorama is dry desert. I believe that back in Moses’ time, this area was all a lot wetter and more fertile but that a few thousand years ago the climate of this area changed making it more arid now than it used to be. Either that or Moses was so delirious from the climb that he was seeing a mirage. All in all, it’s a pretty spectacular view from up there as the wind howls across the ridge. To the south we could see the Dead Sea.
Another interesting thing about the landscape up there on Mount Nebo is that it looks, well, for lack of a better word, really “Biblical”. I guess what I mean is that it looks like the terrain you’ve seen for years in any movie that involves a story from the Bible: dry, scrub brushy hillsides covered with random light tan boulders. It makes you feel like that at any moment Charlton Heston could jump out from behind one of those boulders. Or at the very least Mel Brooks.
From Mount Nebo, we headed south on the King’s Highway, crossing a vast and beautiful canyon called the Wadi Mujib. A river runs from the eastern Jordanian desert, through the Wadi Mujib and out to the Dead Sea. We crossed the river on the top of a huge dam there at the bottom of the massive canyon. Traveling across the Jordanian desert I had to keep reminding myself where I was because it looks remarkably like the desert of Baja California in Mexico, sans the tacos.
South of the Wadi Mujib, we stopped to see an ancient, 12th Century Crusader castle in the town of Karak. Again, on our departure, with the help of our trusty map, we made a few wrong turns and ended up in the middle of a rally protesting Israel’s bombing of Gaza (the bombing had started the day before). After a few zigzags we were back on the road south just as the sun was setting.
We still had a couple of hours of driving to go before we would make it to our destination for the night in southern Jordan and to help lighten the mood of the ride, I decided to give a Jordanian soldier who was hitchhiking a ride. He was a nice enough man who spoke a tiny bit of English and told us he grew up in the area and was heading home. Amy told me I needed to mention to you in this blog that he was also armed, with a holstered gun on his hip. Details, details. After dropping him off, I felt that there wasn’t enough excitement going on during the drive so I decided to give a ride to another man who appeared to pop out of nowhere along the dark road. He didn’t speak any English, so our conversation was limited to him telling us that he used to be in the Army. After dropping this second hitcher off, Amy informed me that I had met and exceeded my quota of Jordanian hitch hikers for the remainder of the trip.
Finally we arrived in the town of Wadi Musa (Valley of Moses) which is just outside the gates of Petra, one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. There’s even a pizza place right outside the gates called “Seven Wonder’s Pizza” just to prove it. Petra is a giant cluster of temples and tombs that were cut right out of the stone cliffs of the desert. They were carved by the Nabataeans, Arabs who controlled the frankincense trade routes of the region in pre-Roman times. They built these tombs, temples and their city in a hidden valley in the south Jordanian desert. You enter the site by walking down a very narrow, 50 foot wide slot canyon for about a mile or two and then all of a sudden it opens up to the front of a massive stone carved tomb called the Treasury. The carved facades of the temples and tombs are incredible and enormous. The number of people trying to sell you a ride on a camel is more impressive. We spent two full days wandering around Petra, climbing rock ridges and dodging touts. It is for sure a touristy area but definitely worth seeing.
From Petra we drove even further south through the desert to an area called Wadi Rum. This is the area that T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) helped fight the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the 20th Century. We shared a jeep tour of this desert area with a couple who was living in Cairo, Egypt. The woman worked for the Filipino consulate in Cairo working on abused domestic worker cases (sound familiar?) and her boyfriend was from Germany and just hanging out vacationing for the winter (sound even more familiar?). The desert landscape was striking. The desert was a mix of rock, scrub brush and big sand dunes, some tan, some red. Big rock arches would pop up every once in a while. Amy and I scurried barefoot up some of the rock formations and walked in the dunes as the cool sand worked its way between our toes. We’d spend most of the day out there before hitting the road again and heading south, our new friends from Cairo in tow.
We headed to Aqaba, in the southwest corner of Jordan where the desert meets the Red Sea. Somewhere around here would be the spot where Moses parted the waters in the old biblical story. We dipped our toes in the sea and bid our friends farewell, as they were catching a ferry back to Egypt. It was amazing to think that from where we stood, on the shores of the Red Sea, we could see four different countries: Egypt, Israel, Jordan and to our left, Saudi Arabia. Amy and I found a place to stay a few miles from the Saudi border; it was now New Year’s Eve.
That night, Amy and I would toast in the New Year with a glass of Arak, an eastern Mediterranean distilled liquor made from grapes and mixed with aniseed. It is served over ice with cold water and has a strong licorice flavor. I’m holding back my gag reflex just describing it to you, it’s utterly disgusting.
The next morning we brushed our teeth twice and headed up the Dead Sea highway, which parallels the Jordanian/Israeli border. There were soldiers and watch towers spread out along the way watching over the border which was a couple miles to the west of the highway. As we approached the Dead Sea we saw that its southern end was consumed by salt mining. The sea itself had been divided up into square sections and was being dried and harvested for its minerals. We finally reached the Dead Sea itself and drove along its eastern edge, our ears popping as we approached its minus 1,385 foot below sea level shore. The shoreline was all rocky with no sign of a beach. The sea is about 30 miles long and about 10 miles wide. Across the water you could see the Palestinian Territory of the West Bank. Since there were no cheap, budget or midrange accommodations, Amy and I were forced to stay at the Dead Sea Marriott, a 5 star, high end luxury resort. Oh well, the sacrifices one makes for travel. This place was pretty decadent with 3 pool areas, 5 restaurants, 4 bars and a spa, all right there on the shore of the Dead Sea. It was also quite pricy even by US standards.
The first thing we did there was head down to the waters of the Dead Sea. There were vats of Dead Sea mud set up on the water’s edge that had been farmed out of the sea. The mud was chock full of minerals that were supposedly good for your skin. The idea was to rub the mud all over your body, let it dry and then rinse it off in the sea. Amy went right for it and smeared up until she looked like Al Jolson. I wasn’t touching the stuff. We then worked our way into the water which was a little chilly. It’s recommended that you slowly back into the water, sitting down and going in butt first. I think the reason for this is to reduce the risk of tweaking yourself by diving into water this buoyant. And buoyant it was. You did not need to tread water at any point; you just laid there and bobbed. You could literally go into a sitting position in the water and your torso would be high enough out of the water that you could hold a book and read it. It was really cool. We just sat there, bobbing like corks on the sea. Needless to say, the water had a really strong salty taste to it, being that it was 8.6 times saltier than the ocean, putting it at almost 34% salinity.
From the Dead Sea we would travel a little ways north to an area called Bethany-Beyond-Jordan. It was the spot where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, and is on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, which flows south into the Dead Sea. From this point, if we looked way up to the east, we could see Mount Nebo, where we started our trip from. Due to the shifting river and the massive amounts of water taken out for irrigation now, the baptism site is no longer at the river’s edge and the river itself is only about 25 feet across, dark and muddy. There was, however, some nice vegetation and birds along its banks. I dunked my pigfoot into the water hoping for a healing miracle to no avail and immediately abandoned my faith knowing that I would have to make a sacrifice to the pagan foot gods if I wanted results, but that’s another story.
The area around the baptism site is a military zone and there were plenty of Jordanian soldiers and lookout towers around, with the Israeli flag flying right on the other side of the river. There was also no shortage of tourists crowding down at the river’s edge, filling up used plastic water bottles with the murky, pesticide tainted slurry that was the Jordan River.
From there we headed north through the Jordan River Valley, passing vegetable stands and farmland. The fields were lush and green and the roadsides were lined with people selling the produce they’d grown a few yards away. Also lining the road were large canvas tents that served as the homes to the farm workers and their families. It had a very “Grapes of Wrath” feeling to it.
From the river valley, we headed up the steep winding road that leads us back towards Amman, ears popping all the way. We passed through Amman and headed into north western Jordan to an area called Jerash. The northern part of Jordan looks a lot like the terrain in Lebanon, very hilly and covered with scrub brush and trees. It was a lot cooler up there as well. Jerash is a well preserved Roman city that was excavated over the past 80 some odd years. We spent the day walking around the temples, plazas and theaters, some of which are over 1,800 years old and in very good preserved condition. There is even a renovated hippodrome where re-enactments of chariot races take place. A bit corny, but pretty cool to see giving you a bit of that “Ben Hur” feeling.
After Jerash, our time was running short, so off to the airport we went. We timed it to try and spend as little time in the airport as possible and so were cutting it close that morning. Things were going well until we were passing through the security check. In Jordan, women go through a different metal detector than men, so Amy got through quickly and was waiting on the other side while I stood in line with a bunch of other men. When I got up to the metal detector I was wearing a fleece sweater, thin polyester hiking pants and hiking shirt and was standing in my socks. I had no metal on me whatsoever. The metal detector, of course, went off and the guard gestured for me to step back. In the meantime, as is custom, 5 other men tried to get through the metal detector, all setting if off as well. As they, too, retreated to take off shoes and watches, I took off my fleece and tried again. No doing, the metal detector went off again. The guard, again, gestured for me to step back and the 5 men who had failed previously were back up trying again, and again they set the detector off. I said to the guard, “I have nothing else on me”, forgetting that he did not speak English. He just gestured me back again and I, out of frustration, stripped down to my boxers and socks then walked through the metal detector which, unbelievable, went off again. Everyone around the security point was now laughing, including me, when I realized I was wearing a pair of boxers that had Hawaiian hula girls on them and my dirty white gym socks. The guard laughed and just waved me through. Amy watched from the other side and handed me my clothes that had gone through the X-ray machine. I felt like Foghorn Leghorn after he gets run through the hay bailing machine and loses all of his feathers, then carries them off in a bundle. I quickly dressed and we made it to the gate just as they were boarding our plane. The funny part about it is that I don’t even have any metal in my foot anymore since it was all taken out in December. Must have been my fillings, right?
1 comment:
Thanks for the fantastic imagery, bobbing in the Dead Sea, going through security in your boxers and actually standing where Moses stood. Mind boggling!
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